The StartX Files: Of Mice and Finns - page 2

Giving The Two-Fingered Salute

There are, at my last count, three window managers with the label PWM. There's the
Plate Window Manager, the Photon Window Manager, and then this one, the construct of one
Toumo Valkonen.

PWM is described as a
"lightweight" window manager for X, and I believe it. After pulling the tiny
little 78 Kb Red Hat RPM down from the PWM site, I had it installed an running on my
system in an eyeblink. Binaries are also available for Linux Mandrake (stable) and Debian
(development), with the ubiquitous tarballs of source available in both stable and
development packages.

PWM is a very simple little window manager with one nifty little feature: the
capability to combine multiple windows into one frame. While this may not seem like a big
deal, I soon found it to be very handy. All you do is grab a window's frame with the
middle mouse button (or, in my case, the two-fingered maneuver) and drag and drop the
window control into the frame you want. Nothing could be easier.

By linking separate instances of Netscape together, I was able to build a simulated
multi-tabbed browser with all of my favorite Linux haunts. I even found a nice little
trick in the documentation to edit the config file to create this automatically.

All of this, and it has workspaces too, as well as some WindowMaker adoptions, such as
dockapp support. In all, pretty handy and clearly very fast. But not very keyboard
oriented, is it?

This distinction belongs to PWM's cousin, ion. ion is also the creation of
Valkonen and shares many of the characteristics of PWM. But in this instance, Valkonen was
trying for something a bit more unique.

Citing the usability problems many current windowed interfaces have because of
overlapping windows, Valkonen's ion removes this issue by not letting any window cover any
other. Instead, ion divides the screen into separate frames, which--like PWM--can handle
more than one client window. Because it's all laid out right there, switching back and
forth among the windows no longer really needs a mouse.

That's the working theory. And in reality, that's what it does. But many of the ion
commands are not entirely intuitive to the uninitiated, so I will give you a piece of
advice that will go a long way with ion: open the man page for ion, print it out, and keep
it beside you for a while next to the keyboard. Because ion is not something you are
going to learn after a few minutes of diddling around--this is going to take a small
investment of your time.

The payoff, I think, is worth it. After using ion for a few days, I hardly ever had to
use my mouse. And the few times I did was more out of habit than anything else. Something
to try for those who are looking for maximum functionality from their GUI.

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